Mississippi carnival: Sarah Palin vs. Brett Favre

MADISON, Miss. — Ladies and gentlemen, the circus has come to Madison County.

As the wild Republican Senate runoff here tumbles to a climax next week, what began as a bare-bones campaign against Sen. Thad Cochran has bloomed into a full-blown political carnival. Insurgent conservative Chris McDaniel, once viewed as a gadfly state legislator propped up by a lonely pair of well-funded national groups, is now at the center of a colorful and unwieldy activist entourage scrambling to grab a piece of his anticipated success.

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The names and faces crowding around McDaniel would be familiar to voters in any number of political battlegrounds, lending a “Wizard of Oz”-like quality to the race. If a voter woke up in the last few days of the election, they’d look around and find all the familiar staples of conservative TV and talk radio arrayed before them: Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum are here. And there’s Ron Paul! And — could that be Chuck Woolery, too?

The former Alaska governor, Pennsylvania senator and Texas congressman, as well as the cheeseball ex-game show host, are all part of the activist road show that has rolled through state after state in the tea party era. It’s the same rogues gallery that flocked to Indiana for the 2012 nomination fight between moderate Sen. Dick Lugar and upstart Richard Mourdock; many of the same little-funded groups and C-list political celebrities rushed to Missouri two years ago to dig in behind Todd Akin’s doomed Senate campaign. They have descended upon Mississippi only in the last few weeks, as McDaniel’s campaign has taken on unmistakable momentum.

For all the Mississippi Senate race’s local importance — it may reorder Mississippi’s relationship with Washington and has already shaken the state’s GOP power structure — the spectacle unfolding here almost defies geography. It is not just a Mississippi phenomenon; it’s the way we live now in the age of frenzied, hyper-nationalized activist politics.

The cavalcade of late support for McDaniel is as colorful as it was predictable: Woolery is headlining a bus tour for the Tea Party Express, a group that barely engaged in the race prior to the first round of voting on June 3. Josh Duggar, the Family Research Council official whose family became famous on the reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” has stumped for McDaniel. New outside groups — low-profile, bandwagon-hopping organizations with names like Now or Never PAC, Let Freedom Ring and the National Association for Gun Rights — have rushed into the race to spend money, often token sums, on McDaniel’s behalf. Ron Paul was here last weekend, and Santorum, the winner of Mississippi’s 2012 presidential primary, gave a full-throated plea for McDaniel on Thursday night.

Standing in front of a preserved red caboose at the corner of a park in this Jackson suburb, a few dozen yards from an inflatable play area where the children of audience members bounced up and down, Santorum insisted that the race in Mississippi was something special: “That’s why you have Sarah Palin and Ron Paul and others coming here, because it’s much bigger.”

“I know in Mississippi, you can be the butt of jokes because you’re 50th in this or whatever the case may be. But now you can be first,” said Santorum, who has also been appearing in TV ads paid for by the group Citizens United. In melodramatic terms, he exhorted the audience to “make a difference, so you can tell your children and grandchildren: You know that race that started America in a different direction? I was here. I was there.”

Voters in the audience seemed alternately entertained and bemused by all the sudden attention lavished upon Mississippi. Some were more interested in the out-of-state entertainment than others. “I’m just really here to hear Chris,” said Sally Fletcher, a makeup artist from Madison.

Jack Tharp, a retiree who was enthusiastic about both McDaniel and Santorum, called all the heavy exposure “unusual” for Mississippi. “I think people will be glad when it’s over with,” he said.

Until about a month ago, the array of organizations and politicians supporting McDaniel was a more exclusive group. Since last October, the state lawmaker has benefited from an extraordinarily lavish outside-spending campaign by the national Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund. Together, those two groups have reported spending more than $4 million on McDaniel’s behalf — nearly 70 cents out of every dollar pumped into the race by anti-Cochran independent groups.